Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
Interpretation
The books we choose to revisit or abandon reveal our true selves more than those books' inherent value.
This quote suggests that our reading habits reflect our personalities and preferences more than the actual merits of the books we encounter. Rereading certain books indicates a personal connection or understanding, while books we cannot finish may symbolize mismatches with our interests, values, or emotional readiness. In essence, our literary choices tell a story about who we are, illuminating our tastes, thoughts, and life experiences.
In practice
During a book club discussion on personal growth, I shared this quote to emphasize how our reading choices can reflect our inner selves.
Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.
They were gone and I missed them but even so I was very happy. For the rest of my life no matter where on this planet earth I went and no matter how scared or confused I got, I could wait until dark and look up into the night sky and see my three friends again and my heart would swell with love of them and make me strong and clearheaded.
I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
Motivations are too tangled and complex.
Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.
One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.
I've written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There's much more intense involvement.
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. . . . He was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. . . . He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating in to clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some occasion is presented to him.
Comerado, this is no book,Who touches this, touches a man,(Is it night? Are we here alone?)It is I you hold, and who holds you,I spring from the pages into your arms-decease calls me forth.
Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.